“It could’ve been a possum stew recipe from his grandma’s cookbook,” I said. “The motherfucker didn’t come visit me in the night. I dreamed that when I was rocked off my ass. The guide, well there’s a coincidence. I’m not going to buy a conspiracy theory about how dead Tom made sure we found it at ye old knickknack shop. I sure as fuck ain’t going to worry my pretty head over what we saw on the mountain. I’m sorry for Vicky and Dane. We’re okay, though and I say let sleeping dogs lie.” I breathed heavily and stared at the hall lamp so hard my eyes hurt.
“Ignoring those sleeping dogs is what got us here. Tommy talked and talked that enchanted evening, had a scary expression as he watched me. His eyes were so strange. I got paranoid thinking he wasn’t really high, that this was a test. Or a trap. I remember him saying there was ‘sure as God made little green apples’ life out there. He pointed at the stars. Cold night in the desert and those stars were right on top of us in their billions. He wanted to meet
them,
except he was afraid. His uncle warned him the only thing an advanced species would want from us would be our meat and bones.”
Glenn didn’t say anything for a while. He rubbed my arm, which still ached fiercely. Finally, he said, “Everything returned to normal after the Mojave trip—he didn’t mention our chat, didn’t seem to recall letting me in on his secret life. A few months later it was summer vacation and we were knocking around Seattle. I came home to visit my folks and the others tagged along. Tommy put together an overnight hike and away we went. I saw him fall into the hole as we were walking way up in the hills along a well-beaten path. Mountain bikers used it a lot, even though it’s a remote spot. Dane and Victor were joking around and I glanced over my shoulder exactly as Tommy fell. I didn’t tell those two what I saw. I made a show of yelling for him until Dane found the sinkhole. Course we called in the troops. I’m sure Vicky told you what happened next. Cops, Fish and Wildlife, everybody we could think of. No luck. That pit just dropped into the center of the Earth and it was impossible to help him. To this day nobody but me is completely sure that’s where Tommy disappeared—it just makes the most sense. Him tripping into a bottomless pit is awful, yeah. Not as awful as other possibilities, though.”
The lamp clicked off and on three times and I raised myself against the headboard and clutched the coverlet to my chin. I lost interest in finally getting to the bottom of Tommy’s death and the weird conspiracy to sanitize its circumstances. “Holy shit— Glenn, please stop. I’ve got a bad feeling.” I had a sense of impending doom, in fact. I could easily envision a colossal meteor descending from on high and smashing the house to bits. Daulton fluffed into a ball of bristling fur and scooted under the bed where he hissed and growled.
Glenn kept rubbing my arm and the light flickered again and again, and the filament ticked like a rattler. “I never told the guys what I really saw that day. Tommy didn’t fall. He was snatched by a hand…not a hand that belonged to any regular person I’ve seen. An arm, fish belly white, shot up and caught his belt and yanked him in…and the hand had…claws. He didn’t even scream. He didn’t make a peep. It happened so fast I thought it couldn’t be real. I dreamed it like you dreamed Tommy was in the living room after the party.”
“I can’t believe this shit,” I said. What had Tommy expected to find in the Black Hills? Another ancient ruin hidden from all but the initiated and the doomed? I was getting colder. I wanted to ask Glenn if he still loved Tommy. Nothing he said would’ve mattered and so I comforted myself with smoldering resentment.
“When we were in the dolmen, did you get a look at that guy’s face?” he said.
“The dude in the crevice? That freaky inbred motherfucker who got separated from all his Ozarks kin? No.”
“I did,” Glenn said. “It was
him
.”
The light went off and stayed off.
14.
I woke with a dry mouth. Glenn’s covers were thrown back and his side of the sheets were cool. I listened to the creaks of the house. The power was out. Glenn laughed, downstairs. He said something unintelligible. In my semiconscious state, I assumed he’d called the power company and was sharing a joke with the poor sap manning the phone center.
Fuzzy-headed, I put on my robe and negotiated the hall and the stairs. A bit of starlight and the tip of the crescent moon gleamed through the windows. Glenn had lighted a candle in the kitchen and it led me through the haunted woods to the doorway. It was only a single candle, a fat one I’d bought at a bookstore for my office but stuck in a kitchen drawer for emergencies instead, and so the room remained mostly in gloom.
She slouched at the opposite end of the dining table. She was naked and lush and repellently white. Her hair was long and thick and black. Her hands rested on the table, and her fingers and cracked, sharp nails were far too long and thin.
Moderor de Caliginis
lay open before her. She lazily riffled pages and smiled at me. I couldn’t see her teeth.
Glenn stood to her left in the breakfast nook, the toes of his slippers in the light, his shape otherwise indistinct. He waited mutely. “Who are you?” I said to her, although I already knew. The covetous way she handled the guide made it clear. “Three guesses,” she said in a perfectly normal, good-humored tone. “Rose, I presume,” I said, voice cracking and ruining my attempt at bravado. “How kind of you to drop in.” The gun was in my coat in the living room. I thought I might make it if I ran and if I didn’t trip over anything.
“How kind of
you
to open your home. Thank you for the lovely note. Yes, I had a fabulous visit to the Peninsula—and points beyond. That saying,
a nice place to visit…
Well, I liked it so much, I decided to naturalize.”
“Glenn,” I said. I was exhausted. It came over me in a wave—the seasick feeling of giving way too much blood at the nurse’s station. I resisted a sudden compulsion to collapse into a chair and lay my head on the table. My fingers and toes tingled. I gripped the doorframe for balance. “Glenn,” I tried again, weak, hopeless. Glenn said nothing.
“He’s not for you. He belongs to Tommy,” Rose said. “He belongs to us. We love him. You were never part of their inner circle, were you Willem? Second best for Glenn. His vanilla life after graduation into the real world of jobs, bills, routine sex. No thrills, not like college.” She closed the book and traced the broken ring on its cover. “Alas, nice guys do indeed finish last. I, however, believe in second chances and do-overs. Would you like a do-over, Willem? You’ll need to decide whether to come along with us and see the sights. Or not. You are more than welcome to join the fun. Goodness knows, I hope you do. Tommy does too.”
The cellar door had swung open while I was distracted. Rose stood and took Glenn’s hand. They passed over the threshold. He turned and stared at me. Behind him was infinite blackness. Her arms, pale as death, emerged from that blackness and draped his shoulders. She caressed him. She whispered in his ear, and in mine.
The pull was ineluctable; I released the doorframe and crossed the room in slow, tottering steps like a man wading into high tide. The universe whirled and roared. I came within kissing distance of my love and looked deep into his dull, wet eyes, gazed into the bottomless pit. His face was inert but for the eyes. Maybe that was really him waiting somewhere down there in the dark.
“Oh, honey,” I said, and stepped back and shut the door.
15.
I sold the house and moved across the country. For nearly a decade, I’ve lived on a farm in Kingston, New York, with an artist who welds bed frames and puts them on display in galleries. We share the property with a couple of nanny goats, some chickens, two dogs and Daulton. I write my culture essays, although Burt makes enough neither of us needs a real job. Repairing the fences in the field, patching the shed roof and making the odd repairs around the house keep me occupied, keep me from chewing my nails. Nothing can help me as I lie awake at night, unfortunately. That’s when I do the real damage to myself. Against my better judgment I mailed the
Black Guide
to Professor Berman, though I cursed him for a fool during our last email exchange.
Victor’s confined to an asylum and his doctor contacts me on occasion, hoping I’ll reveal what “massive trauma” befell his patient to precipitate his catastrophic break from reality. From what I gather, Victor keeps journals—dozens of them. He’s got a yen for astronomy and physics and at least one scientist thinks he’s a savant. Dane disappeared three years after our fateful trip and hasn’t resurfaced. His credit cards and bank accounts remain untouched. The cops asked me about this, too. I really don’t know, and I don’t want to, either.
Burt raised his eyebrows when I bought the .12 gauge shotgun a few months back and parked it by my side of the bed. I told him it was for varmints and he accepted that. There are cougars and bears and coyotes lurking in the nearby forest. He hasn’t a clue that when he’s away on his infrequent art show trips, I sit in our homey kitchen by the light of a kerosene lamp with the gun on the table and watch the small door leading into the cellar. The door is bolted, not that I’m convinced it matters. It began a few weeks ago and only happens when Burt’s out of town. He’s not a part of this, thank God for small favors. The dogs used to lie at my feet and whine. Lately, the normally loyal pair won’t come into the room after dark, and I don’t blame them.
Burt’s in the city for the weekend. He’s mixing with the royalty and pining for home, has said as much in no less than a half-dozen phone messages. I sit here in the gathered gloom, with a bottle of scotch, a glass, and a loaded gun. Really, it’s pointless. I sip scotch and wait for the soft, insistent knocks against the cellar door, for Glenn to whisper that he loves me. Guilt and loneliness have worked like acid on my insides. God help me, but more and more, I’m tempted to rack the slide and eject the shells, send them spinning across the floor. I’m tempted to leave the deadbolt unlocked. Then see what happens next.
Catch Hell
1.
For years she awakened in the darkest hours to a baby crying. She finally accepted the nursery they’d sealed like a tomb was really and truly empty, that the crib was empty. She learned to cover her ears until the crying stopped. It never stopped.
2.
Olde Towne lay forty miles east of Seattle in hill country, a depressed region populated by poor rural folk who worked the ranches, dairies, and farms. Forests, deep and forbidding, swept along the hem of tilled land. Farther on, the terrain rose into a line of mountains that divided the state.
The town’s streets were bracketed by houses with peaked roofs. The houses were made of brick or stone with tall brick chimneys. People had settled here long ago; many homes bore bronze plates designating them as historic landmarks. Shops squeezed tight, fronted by wooden awnings and boardwalks; signs were done in gilt script over double-paned glass, or etched into antique shingles. Ancient magnolias and chestnuts reared at intervals to shade the sidewalks and the lanes. The police station, firehouse, and city hall occupied the far end of Main Street; art deco structures bordered by lawns, hedgerows, and picket fences. One could imagine the police gunning down the McCoys on the courthouse steps.
Sonny and Katherine Reynolds waited for the light to change at the intersection of Main Street and Wright. Options at the airport had been limited, so they rented a sedan—a blocky gas guzzler that swallowed most of its lane, but, happily enough, possessed far more than sufficient trunk space to accommodate their luggage and Sonny’s carton of research texts and notes. He told her several times during the drive it was like steering a boat. Katherine wanted a chance behind the wheel. Sonny laughed and said he’d let her drive it on the return leg of their journey. She called him a liar, but the ease of his humor, so removed from his usual melancholy, surprised her into a smile and she reached across and clasped his hand. Their hands on the wheel caught fire and burned orange, then red, as if they’d renewed an unspoken blood compact.
“Wow, a real live soda shop,” she said. The sign outside of town claimed a population of three thousand. She estimated two or three times that number seeded throughout the surrounding countryside. Such a small, insular community—no wonder it clung to its heyday.
“Stuck in the ’50s,” he said. “Cripes—is that a wooden Indian in front of the barber shop?
“Yes indeedy.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“I’ve never seen so many weathervanes in one place,” she said. This was true; she spied one on nearly every roof, lazily revolving in the westerly breeze. Most were iron roosters.
“Wisconsin, it’s cheese, he said. “Here, the fascination seems to be with cock. Gotta watch out for them cock fetishists.”
“It’s a left. Up ahead past that pink building.” She shook her road map open.
“Looks like the set of a modern gothic. I read there’s a big institution just down the road with the lights still on and everything. Guess they weren’t
all
closed in the ’80s.”
Katherine immediately withdrew from him, embittered by his indifference, his callous disregard for her aversion to such places. “You fuck,” she said and turned away and rested her forehead against the window.
“Yeah, I’m a fuck,” he said cheerfully, and played with the radio dial. The local station crackled in. Apparently the afternoon DJ was a transcendentalist; she spoke in the monotone of an amateur hypnotist and played recordings of wind chimes and the periodic rattle of what might’ve been gravel shaken in a jar.
The street narrowed to a bumpy stretch of country road, and climbed a series of bluffs that gave them a view of the entire valley. Sonny turned onto a blacktop drive that made a shallow, quarter-mile curve through a field of wild flowers and blackberry thickets and overgrown wooden fences, until it ended in a lot before the Black Ram Lodge. The building sat at the edge of a forest: brick and mortar and half-timber; three floors with a long, sloping tile roof flanked by hedges and a stand of enormous magnolia trees. The windows were dark and impenetrable.